Chicago tourism numbers hit record high, topping 55 million in 2017

Chicago welcomed more than 55 million visitors last year, a tally Mayor Rahm Emanuel had hoped to reach by 2020.

Chicago welcomed more than 55 million visitors last year, a tally Mayor Rahm Emanuel had hoped to reach by 2020. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

Josh NoelChicago Tribune

A record 55.2 million people traveled to Chicago in 2017, according to the city’s initial estimates, which reaches a goal set by Mayor Rahm Emanuel — two years ahead of schedule.

In early 2014, Emanuel said he wanted to attract 55 million annual visitors by the year 2020; the city had hosted 48.3 million people the previous year. Despite a dip in business-related visits last year, Chicago eclipsed the mark in 2017, thanks to an upswing in leisure tourism.

Hotel occupancy — which is how both leisure and business travel are estimated — saw a 7.6 percent year-over-year surge during peak tourist season, June to September. Overall, Chicago hotels saw 3.3 percent growth in 2017.

Bringing in events like the restaurant industry’s James Beard Foundation Awards and the NFL draft in recent years upped the city’s profile, he said, along with popular developments such as the Riverwalk.

Chicago’s increasingly robust cultural offerings — about to get richer with the addition of the Obama Presidential Center in 2021 — mean the tourism trend is poised to continue, Emanuel said.

“We’re creating institutional strength for the future that makes this not a one-time thing,” he said, “but longtime growth.”

Emanuel said President Donald Trump’s occasional potshots at Chicago’s struggle with gun violence clearly aren’t having a negative impact on tourism.

“The numbers don’t lie,” he said. “When it comes to visitors looking at Chicago, they’ll listen to Bon Appetit more than President Trump. Or the Financial Times more than Trump. Or they’ll listen to their friends who have great things to say.”

The new statistics from the mayor’s office and the city’s visitors bureau, Choose Chicago, credit the tourism industry with supplying an estimated 146,500 jobs — some 22,000 more positions than in 2011, when Emanuel took office. A key driver of that job growth has been the city’s expanding hotel footprint. Chicago opened five new hotels in 2017; eight more are scheduled to debut this year.

Business-related hotel stays were down 2.6 percent last year. Choose Chicago CEO David Whitaker largely chalked that up to “several major semiannual conventions that meet in Chicago every other year, so odd years are always sluggish for growth.”

The overall rise in visitation marks a nearly 2.5 percent increase from the 2016 total of 53.8 million. (That figure was adjusted slightly downward from the 54.1 million initially announced at the beginning of 2017 due to an updated method of counting international visitors, Whitaker said.)

Whitaker attributed part of the growth in leisure travel to a digital advertising campaign launched in May. The ads, he said, drew “more engagements from the 10 biggest states than our eight (nearby) states, which we’ve been overly dependent on in years past.

“It’s wonderful that we’re the playground of the Midwest,” Whitaker added. “But the goal to grow is to attract visitors from more major urban centers from around country.”

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